On Thursday, March 9, Just Buffalo Literary Center presents readings by three poets. Two, Noah Falck and Mike Kelleher, are closely tied to Just Buffalo: Falck is currently the center’s education director, and Kelleher was longtime artistic director before leaving to run Yale University’s Windham-Chapman Literature Prizes. Both have had poems featured recently in The Public.

Poet Rosa Alcalá teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso (she earned her PhD at the University at Buffalo); her collection Undocumentaries was published in 2010, and a new collection, My(Other) Tongue, comes out this year. The selections below come from the new collection.

Paramour

English is dirty. Polyamorous. English

wants me. English rides with girls

and with boys. English keeps an open

tab and never sleeps

alone. English is a smooth talker

who makes me say please. It’s a bit of role-playing

and I like a good tease. We have a safe word

I keep forgetting. English likes

pet names. English

has a little secret, a past,

another family. English is going to leave them

for me. I’ve made English a set

of keys. English brings me flowers

stolen from a grave.

English texts me, slips in

as emojis, attaches selfies

NSFW. English has rules

but accepts dates last minute. English makes

booty-calls. English makes me want it.

When I was younger, my parents said

keep that English out of our

house. If you leave with that miserable,

don’t come back. I said god willing

in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out

my window, but always got

caught. English had a hooptie

that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga

over our cute babies. Together

English and I wrote my father’s

obituary. How many times

have I said it’s over, and English just laughs

and says, c’mon, señorita, let’s go for

Chinese. We always end up

in a fancy hotel where we give

fake names, and as I lay my head

to hear my lover breathe,

I dream of Sam Patch plunging

into water: a poem

English gave me

that had been given

to another.

—Rosa Alcalá,

(From M(y)Other Tongue, forthcoming Futurepoem Books, 2017. First appeared as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Red, White, & Blue: Poets on Politics series, 2012.)

At Hobby Lobby

She tosses a bolt of fabric into the air. Hill country, prairie, a horse trots there. I say three yards, and her eyes say more: What you need is guidance, a hand that can zip scissor through cloth. You need a picture of what you’ve lost. To double the width against the window for the gathering. Consider where you sit in the morning (transparency’s appealing, except it blinds us before day’s begun). How I long to captain that table, to repeat in a beautiful accent a customer’s request. My mother cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it dug into the waist. Or kneeled against her client and pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband’s collar. I can see this in my sleep, among notions. My bed was inches from the sewing machine, a dress on the chair weeping its luminescent frays. Sleep was the sound of insinuation, a zigzag to keep holes receptive. Or awakened by a backstitch balling under the foot. A needle cracking? Blood on a white suit? When my baby’s asleep I write to no one and cannot expect a response. The fit’s poor, always. No one wears it out the door. But fashions continue to fly out of magazines like girls out of windows. Sure, they are my sisters. Their machines, my own. The office from which I wave to them in their descent has uneven curtains, made with my own pink and fragile hands.

—Rosa Alcalá

(From M(y)Other Tongue, forthcoming Futurepoem Books, 2017. First appeared on the Academy of American Poets website (poets.org), 2012.)